Dawn did not so much break over Oxford as filter through, a wan grey light seeping along the rain-streaked window of Richard's flat. The storm had exhausted itself, leaving behind a battered sky and a washed-clean city dripping and quiet. Richard awoke not to the usual, rasping scrape in his chest, but to a profound and alien stillness in his own body.For an infinite duration, he lay still on the small mattress in the corner, his mind creeping back from the depths of an opium-sleep, dreamless. The previous night had been a delirious fever dream, a hallucination composed of exhaustion, desperation, and the fury of the storm. The glowing code, the sonorous, metallic voice, the throbbing beaker—it had to have been a breakdown. A final, brilliant defeat of the mind.And then he rolled over, and the world realigned.He sat up, and no agony attendant on the motion in his ribs accompanied the act. He let his legs hang over the edge of the bed, and no dizzying cough rocked his frame. He took

The exhilaration of his own recovery was a powerful poison. Richard knew this. The scientist in him, even as it was temporarily overpowered by the miracle, was reasserting itself with a veteran caution. One data point, no matter how deep, was anecdote. A clinical trial required a cohort, controls, and replicable outcomes. He had entered a new world, but he was not leaving the scientific process behind. It was his sole master in this uncharted realm.His fresh, clean lungs inhaled a firm breath as he surveyed his kingdom of disarray. The miracle had happened here, but it was born out of chaos. To understand it, to master it, he needed order. His first task was not synthesis, however, but sanitation. He filled much of a day with a manic, furious cleaning. He washed beakers until they shone, reorganized his meager chemical supplies with obsessive attention, and swept a cleared space on the bench in front of the laptop, now humming with a soft, steady watchfulness. This region, he decreed

The knock was a shot in the quietness of the flat.Richard started, his heart thudding for an instant before resuming a frantic, jumpy rhythm. No one knocked on his door. The mail was deposited in the entry hall; the landlord used brusque, typed messages that were slid under the door. This room had been an hermitage, an exile of sorts, for over a year, where only the conflicts he waged with himself and the silent, profound dialogue with the radiating Interface were heard.Knock, knock, but this time more urgently. Rain beat on the window in a frantic beat to the interruption.He crept, all his senses on high alert. The System was dormant, laptop closed, but its existence stretched as a thriller too big for the walls of the room, a colossal truth wedged only into the narrow walls by a fraction. He peered through the fisheye lens, his distorted vision revealing to him a figure surrounded by the dim, watery light of the corridor.His breath was caught.It was Elizabeth Ben.She was dripp

The miracle in the hospital ward did not stay within that room. It was a stone thrown into the stagnant pond of Oxford's suffering, and its ripples sped with a speed that was both wonderful and breath-taking. There were no press releases, no papers. The funds there were more potent: begged prayers at soup kitchen lines, whispered supplications in double-bunked hostels, the hesitating, swelling hope in the eyes of those against whom the medical establishment had turned.The healer," they referred to him, although not many knew his face or his name. "Miracle pills." The descriptions were indistinct, miraculous. Tiny capsules that shimmered with inner light, that had the flavor of rain and mint, that chased away pain and cleaned out infections when antibiotics could not.Elizabeth became head designer of their underground network. Her hospital internship granted both access and cover. She knew the patients that slipped through the cracks—the illegal, the uninsured, the ones who had disea

The conference room on the 50th floor of Medicon Industries tower building's corporate headquarters was air-conditioned, filtered, and meticulously still, save the quiet hum of climate control and the soft click of a finger on cool obsidian. The London cityscape lay spread out before the windows, a mosaic of power and cash, but the room's lone occupant stood with his back turned to it.CEO Daniel Huxley was a man honed by granite and determination. His suit bore witness to Savile Row, his tie to a slash of blood-red silk, but his eyes were the true source of his authority—cold, calculating, devoid of warm feeling. He scrolled through an electronic document on a tablet, his face one of flat, disdainful amusement.The file included the Oxford local paper account, the anonymous "P.C. Healer" newsletter, and the original threat appraisal prepared by Victor Croft's department."A 'phantom apothecary,'" declared Huxley, his tone a rich, smooth baritone that hinted at no actual amusement. "H